Beyond the Sword

Posted on August 5, 2007 by Soren Johnson

So, the second expansion for Civ4 came out last week. It has been received very well; in fact, it’s the top-rated “recent” PC game, according to Metacritic. I’d like to heartily congratulate my old mates at Firaxis for a job well done – I am especially looking forward to trying out Jon’s and Alex’s new game concepts as well as seeing the job Sirian did with adding events to the core game. The variety of mods and scenarios included in the expansion (ranging from space to fantasy to WW2 to world history) is truly impressive and demonstrates that our efforts making Civ4 so moddable have paid off. I am especially proud of the mods which were contributed from the fan community; I am always surprised how much enjoyment I get watching people become game designers within the Civ universe.

I have to admit, it’s a little odd being on the outside looking in on a major Civilization release. It’s a game that has gone through many different shepherds over the years and will probably continue to do so as long as people want to rule the world. Well, it was a fun ride while it lasted. Good luck to the new generation!

Puzzle Quest

Posted on July 22, 2007 by Soren Johnson

I’ve been playing a lot of Puzzle Quest recently, and I have been very impressed with how a fairly simple RPG layer can turn Bejeweled – which has always been, for me, a fairly forgettable casual game – into a very addictive experience. Adding a layer of level grinding… er, advancing… to the basic match-3 gameplay transforms two things which are uninspiring in isolation into a very compelling package. Further, the puzzle game itself becomes significantly more interesting when there is a level of competition – knowing that matching these reds gems prevents my opponent from matching those attack skulls transforms the gameplay from mindless pattern matching into a very interesting tactical contest. The interesting thing is that Bejeweled always had look-ahead gameplay to encourage combos and whatnot, but it always felt lifeless to me when I was only competing for some abstract concept like score.

There is one further design choice of note in Puzzle Quest which deserves mention – there is no save system. Of course, the game maintains your information over multiple sessions (this is an RPG, after all), but you never actually have to tell your DS to “Save the Game.” The whole save process occurs automatically in the background every time something important happens (like fighting a battle or discovering a spell or buying an item). I was kind of weirded out the first time I wanted to turn off my DS while playing PQ, but I didn’t see a save option, so I just hoped for the best and shut down. The reason they can get away with this is that nothing bad can ever happen to you! You can never lose an item or fail a mission or miss an opportunity. At no time would you ever wish to go back to an “old save.” Because the game gives you experience and gold even when you lose battles – and you always have a chance to try again – you will eventually get the loot or level that you want.

This is not a simple innovation as there are important trade-offs to consider – for one, player-controlled save systems encourage experimentation. Players enjoy being able to try something wacky (“What happens if I declare war on Gandhi?”) because they can simply go back to an earlier version of the game. The designers might have learned from MMOs like WoW which, of course, have no player-controlled save systems either. Being single-player, they had the freedom to remove the death penalty altogether, which puts the player experimentation back into the game. For Puzzle Quest, the designers must have made it a point at the beginning of the project to take all design options which could permanently hurt the player off the table – even extending to such RPG standards as single-use equipment!

The lack of a save system is a big win for Puzzle Quest because it increases the game’s accessibility. A large part of the game’s potential audience – the Bejeweled crowd – has never played an RPG in their lives, which means they have never saved a game either. It’s just one more hoop that new players have to learn – unless, of course, you can figure out a way to remove the hoop altogether…

Advanced Protection

Posted on July 21, 2007 by Soren Johnson

This afternoon, I gave a talk to some Korean game developers and academics on developing the AI for Civilization. One of them asked about a strategy game that I developed back in another lifetime which used genetic AI. I promised that I would add a link on my blog to this project, which was titled Advanced Protection. It’s a little MFC app that demonstrates how genetic algorithms can be used to encourage more adaptive AI behavior (although I should mention that the game mechanics were designed largely to favor an environment in which a GA could be used…)

As an aside, there was actually a Genetic AI project for Civ4 that was ongoing for a number of months. Too bad it is currently defunct…

Everything Old is New Again

Posted on July 19, 2007 by Soren Johnson

So, E3 2007 – or some close approximation thereof – is come and gone, and the coolest thing I saw from the comfort of my own desk is this game. It’s called Echochrome, and my minimalist heart loves the sparse black-and-white style and elegant score. The Escher-inspired puzzle gameplay looks pretty tasty as well. At first, I was afraid that the controls might be unwieldy, but on a second viewing, it became clear that the player doesn’t actually control the character. Instead, the character simply always walks forward (and, smartly by the designers, doesn’t die if it reaches a dead-end… that would be a little too hard-core). The player’s job is just to rotate the image so the character can navigate the maze by moving ahead automatically. Brilliant.

Funnily enough, this is not the first platformer (or whatever you want to call it) to be inspired by Esher. In fact, it was not the only innovative game garnering much attention that is actually just an update of an old idea or two. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! The early years of gaming were full of great ideas that were often years (or decades!) before their time. I’m glad I grew up during that very messy period; indeed, I have my own mind set on someday updating one specific classic game from the early ’80s that would be just as fresh today as it was back then.

The 7-Year Switch…

Posted on April 19, 2007 by Soren Johnson

Since Gamespot called me out for not updating my blog, I should probably make an announcement. I have joined EA Maxis in sunny California to work on Spore. Thus, I have left Firaxis after 7 years of work, during which I was co-designer of Civ 3, lead designer of Civ 4, and project lead on various other projects that never saw the light of day. It was a great run – I got to work with Sid Meier, who lives up to the billing, played a major role in growing one of my favorite games, and made a lot of great friends.

However, working on a game like Spore and with the incredible team that Will Wright has assembled in Emeryville was an offer I couldn’t refuse. So, leaving the job that almost defined my life for many years to come to EA (technically, to come back to EA) was definitely a bittersweet moment.

Of course, the more things change…

My Favorite Week…

Posted on March 4, 2007 by Soren Johnson

My favorite week of the year is next week. It’s GDC week, which is like the holiday season for game developers – a chance to get everyone together in one place to share, help, and inspire each other in our jobs. This will be my sixth year, and I have yet to be disappointed.

I will be taking part on a panel discussion about the future of PC gaming, hosted by David Edery, from 12:00 – 1:00 on Thursday in Room 3010, West Hall. Among the questions to be answered are “Is PC Gaming D0MED?!?” For a preview of my thoughts, check out this interview with CVG.

How Fast Can Risk Go?

Posted on January 22, 2007 by Soren Johnson

Pretty Fast.

Dice Wars is a very well done, minimalist version of Risk, that old strategy chestnut. It is worth checking out, especially to see just how fast the classic dice battle gameplay can be streamlined. The rules are a tad opaque (you get new dice based on the highest number of connected territories you control), but the absolute lack of waiting or downtime easily makes up for it. One design decision in particular – new dice (your “armies”) are placed randomly instead of by the player – strikes me as interesting because it flies in the face of conventional game design. Not being able to place your own dice does take away a strategic element, but the benefit of having a simpler game with less fussiness easily outweighs the cost. I can get my strategy fix in 15 minutes or less… that is no small feat!

Odds ‘n’ Sods

Posted on December 15, 2006 by Soren Johnson

Sorry, it’s been awhile since I have updated the site. I’ve been working hard on my new “secret project” – which, of course, I can’t talk about. However, there have been a few random bits I should post about.

I had a “personal” interview” on NextGen, which wasn’t the usual batch of questions.

I did a podcast at Apolyton recently in which I discussed the release of Civ Chronicles, specifically my involvement in the extras provided in the package. (I redid my GDC presentation on prototyping Civ4 for the included DVD and wrote some articles for the book, such as this one on the Civ fan community. I also designed this card game for it.)

Speaking of my GDC presentation, a video of the PolyCon version is now available on Apolyton. Here’s a link to the first clip.

ApolyCon ’06

Posted on July 15, 2006 by Soren Johnson

ApolyCon was last weekend here in the Hunt Valley region north of Baltimore. The convention was organized by one of the major Civ fan-sites, Apolyton. It was interesting to find out how far many people had travelled for the event; I believe that we had at least four from Europe (two from the UK, one from the Netherlands, and one from Greece). A number of Firaxians (including Sid, Barry Caudill, Dorian Newcomb, Alex Mantzaris, and Jon Shafer) dropped by to talk with the community. I really enjoyed the event – it is very interesting to meet people who know all about the issues that have been floating around my head for the last five or six years.

Dorian and I gave an extended version of our GDC presentation on prototyping Civ4 – “extended” meaning that we were no longer constrained to fit it into a 50 minute time-frame. I believe it was recorded on video, so I suppose that will probably surface on Apolyton at some point. I’ll post a link when it does… until then, here is a link to the original slides from the GDC site.

A Moveable Interface…

Posted on July 12, 2006 by Soren Johnson

Our Civ4 interface programmer, Pat Dawson, was a big fan of World of WarCraft. One of the most impressive things about that game is the flexibility it gives users to create their own custom interfaces. The interesting thing about that decision is that while it taps into the incredible resources of the user modding community, it is also a tacit admission that a game’s interface is best developed in concert with the players.

I first started playing WoW over a year after the initial launch. Thus, I assumed that a number of modifications had been made to the official interface since then. I noticed that the system for updating the progess of your quests (SHIFT-clicking on them so they appear permanently on the right side of the screen) seemed a little hacky. The text, for example, didn’t have a background and sometimes overran other interface elements. Also, the limit of only showing five quests seemed quite arbitrary… but it sure was useful! I asked my hard-core WoW buddy about this feature, and he said – sure enough – it was added in a post-release patch. Now, I have no way of knowing, but I strongly suspect that a user-created interface mod inspired them to make that change. The on-screen quest display seems like a classic case of showing what the user cares about as opposed to what the designer thinks the user should care about.

At any rate, getting back to Pat… he pushed hard late in the project for us to move all of our interface into Python. This decision really paid off in the long run as the amount of interesting and useful Civ4 interface mods is growing rapidly. In fact, a couple of these mods were rolled into our last two patches, such as ulfn’s Proper Score Graph and the health bars from 12monkeys’s Plot List Enhancement. Quite simply, they fixed things we could have done better – no one knows how best to make an interface than someone who uses it day after day after day. We play our games a lot, but we can never play them as much as our fans do.

I have no idea if this is happening in the mod communities of other games, but I also enjoy the “compendium” mods that seem to be popping up, which merge together all of the useful interface mods out there. Guarav’s Yet Another Unaltered Gameplay Mod is a good example. There are lots of good changes here – a Foreign and Military Advisor, a Civilopedia with a persistent menu “pane”, Great People quotes, triggering diplomacy reminders and messages, showing turns left for Culture and Great People Points, a customizable Domestic Advisor, and so on. These changes are very interesting to see as a designer because they meet the informational and aestethic demands that the community has for the interface.